Lucretius, TITUS CARUS, Roman poet, lived in the first half of the 1st century B.C., but of the particulars of his life we really know nothing. A story was current some time after his death that he died raving mad from the effects of a love-potion administered to him by his wife Lucilia, and on this story Tennyson has founded a very striking and powerful poem; but it would seem to have been a malicious invention, started by some hostile critic, or possibly by an early Christian writer who took delight in assuming that a champion of unbelief and materialism must have come to a bad end. The great—indeed, the only—work of Lucretius is an essay in hexameter verse, 'On the Nature of Things' (De Rerum Natura), in six books, containing upwards of 7400 lines. The work was said, but on no good authority, to have been revised by Cicero. All we know is that Cicero once briefly alludes to it (Epist. ad Quintum Fratrem, ii. 9), observing that there are several flashes of genius in the poem, and that much skill is shown in the composition. This is a very fair criticism, and it has commended itself to general acceptance. The poem, we take it, was on the whole coldly received by Roman readers, and with the moderns Lucretius has never been a popular classic. The subject-matter of his work is not generally attractive, nor is the versification for the most part pleasing or harmonious. Lucretius aspired to popularise the philosophical theories of Democritus and Epicurus on the origin of the universe, with the special purpose of eradicating anything like religious belief, which he is always savagely denouncing as the one great source of man's wickedness and misery. In this he is terribly in earnest, and he is never so eloquent as when he is striking at this hated enemy. The often-quoted verse, 'Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,' expresses his innermost conviction, and out of this springs his finest and most vigorous poetry. A calm and tranquil mind was his summum bonum, and the only way to it lay through a materialistic philosophy which teaches that immortality is an empty dream. To Lucretius this was a positively delightful thought; he hailed it as a sure deliverance from the worst terrors which haunt men's minds. The universe, as it exists, was, he held, evolved out of ultimate elementary atoms, infinite in number, streaming downwards in void space, like a huge snowstorm; this, or something like it, was the theory of Democritus. Creation, as we understand it, is impossible; nothing can come out of nothing, neither can anything be destroyed; destruction is only a name for a change of substance. Life, mind, soul, &c. are simply parts of the man in the same sense as his limbs, and being in their nature corporeal, being, as we should say, functions of the body, they perish finally with the body, or at least so perish as to leave no survival of consciousness. All knowledge is derived from the senses, which are in fact our only test and criterion of truth. All phenomena can be explained by natural causes, and thus the door is closed against any belief in the divine or supernatural. Lucretius, in fact, is substantially in accord with modern materialism, and he often reminds us of some of the newest theories of modern science. For instance, he explains contagious diseases by the perpetual flying about in the air of minute particles, germs as we call them, injurious to life; and again, in his account of the various types of animal life as they successively appeared on the earth, we have something like anticipations of the 'survival of the fittest,' and of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Every now and then, indeed, there is quite a modern flavour about the doctrines of Lucretius. Still, it is as a poet that he has his chief interest for us, though the man himself, in his intense earnestness, no doubt put his philosophy before his poetry. A very readable book might be made up with the title 'The Beauties of Lucretius.' His poem abounds in strikingly picturesque phrases, such as only a great poet could have originated; scattered up and down in it are episodes of exquisite pathos and vivid description, perhaps hardly to be equalled in the whole range of Latin poetry. Now and then he allegorises some of the popular myths and legends, showing how they foreshadow moral truths, and in such passages he is one of the sublimest and most impressive of poets.
For a full discussion of Lucretius and his poetry, see Professor Sellar's Roman Poets of the Republic (1863); Professor Veitch's Lucretius and the Atomic Theory (1875); and The Atomic Theory of Lucretius, by John Masson (1884). The first edition of Lucretius was printed about 1473 at Brescia; this was followed in 1500 by the Aldine (published by Aldus), and in 1563 by the edition of Lambinus, which from that time held its place for upwards of three centuries as the standard text. In 1832 appeared the edition of the great German scholar Lachmann, in which the text was thoroughly revised, and on this in 1870 Munro greatly improved, adding a most valuable commentary and a close and vigorous prose translation. Creech's translation into English verse (1714) was the work of an enthusiastic admirer of the poet and his philosophy; it is on the whole a good piece of work, but is little known.